Blackwater. Part 23

Oh, to be carried along! To move with the slowly pulsating water and yet be quite still. Like the water weeds in the stream, rigid hornwort and water lobelia.

She felt a strong desire to test out her voice and see whether those diaphragm muscles were still there. Whether her voice had any volume and she could open up for the keynote. She moved a little further away. The ewes didn't follow her across the stream, but they got to their feet and stood watching her as they chewed the cud, their jawbones working. It made them look absent-minded.

She climbed a bit up the shale slope and tried seated at first, but was unable to produce a note worth mentioning. Then she did some exercises and could feel it beginning to swell. She sang. It was a strong feeling and just the same as before. The note hadn't shrivelled, nor the feeling. She sang: 'I feed on earth and drink water that is why I'm so fine!'

Again and again she sang it, filled by the tone and the feeling, which was the strongest she would ever experience.

'I feed on earth and drink water that is why I'm so fine . . .'

But she knew that if there had been people down there, rather than sheep, her feelings would have been of anguish and fear, and her clothing would have smelt sour with sweat. She had been given a gift. But only one half of it.

The ewes raised their heads as she pa.s.sed them on her way back. The pasture was still. No smoke from the chimneys dissolved into the sky. September dusk. She opened the door very quietly as she went in, hoping they were all asleep.

He had to take Galm out of the reindeer enclosure and scold him. But actually he was glad to be able to get away for a while. He was supposed to be one of Tuoma Balte's labourers and look for his markings, but he couldn't distinguish many in that maelstrom of bodies, hoofs and horns. Stamping and grunting and clicking. The largest antlers hovered above the herd. Most of them were speckled grey, but white animals gleamed here and there, trembling in his field of vision as long as he could keep track of the body in the whirling, creaking, hawking wheel of beasts. The click of hoofs sounded like the ticking of a huge clock.

Galm was totally wild. He didn't herd like the Lapp dogs he hunted. Someone came towards Johan as he was struggling with Galm.

'Dov biene dan nihkoe!'

Johan didn't understand, though he thought he knew a little by now. When he looked up it was Oula Laras. At first he hardly recognised him because he was so much smaller that he remembered. What little of his black hair was showing under the cap was streaked with white, like a badger.

'What kind of wild thing you got there? Is't a Siberian?'

In his haste, he said yes, then immediately regretted it. The first thing he had ever said to Oula Laras was not entirely true. Only in part. But it was too late now, for Laras took hold of Galm by the scruff of the neck and said: 'You should have a team of these. And compete.'

'Yes, I'd thought of that,' said Johan, though that wasn't strictly true, either. But it became so that very moment.

'Who are you, then?'

He was just about to say the Pergutt's cousin, but at that moment the Pergutt himself came towards them and Johan remembered what they had agreed on at school. He didn't want to be called just Per's boy any longer. So Johan said: 'I'm cousin to him Lars Dorj.'

'He's Torsten Brandberg's youngest,' the Pergutt said.

'And Gudrun,' said Johan.

He didn't see how Oula Laras reacted when he was told, because he hadn't dared look up. His face burned and he knew he had flushed scarlet. But Laras said something to the Pergutt that Johan didn't understand, though he heard him calling him Pergutt. Then Laras ran his tongue under his lip, caught the wedge of snuff and spat it out. He rubbed his front teeth with a curved forefinger, then smiled a whiter smile and said: 'Now, lads, time for some b.l.o.o.d.y work!'

Galm barked, hearing from the tone of voice that something was going to happen, and he went on barking at Laras for a long time after he had gone back to the enclosure and disappeared behind the seething stream of creatures rus.h.i.+ng clockwise inside the fencing.

'What did he say to you?' said Johan.

'Nothing, just "So you're to go to school, eh?"'

Pergutt also went back inside the enclosure and Johan could occasionally see him close to Laras, sometimes far away. His la.s.so swirled round in the air and shortly after, with the help of his father, Pergutt was dragging out a bull reindeer. The creature was rolling its eyes and tossing its antlers. When they got to the slaughtering shed, it thrust its four hoofs into the ground and tried to get away from the smell of blood and the sound of the saw. A diesel engine was rumbling evenly, and water was spurting out of the hose from the pump down by the stream. He could see the ravens sailing above the stack of heads and antlers, but he couldn't hear them. Oula Laras cried out as he was almost dragged down by a bull. His knife dangled at his belt as he ran, a long, curved knife. Must be the same one. Johan tried to remember it all again. It had gone too quickly this time as well.

That time, it had been late winter April the light strong and the silence like a gla.s.s bell round the mountain. Now all the dogs were barking, the generator rumbling and the bone-saw whistling. He could just see the peaked cap. It was orange with white lettering on the front and easily spotted.

'Christ almighty!' Oula Laras yelled. 'Calm down a bit, can't you, you old devil!'

We walk in a dark forest, thin strings of light between the branches of the trees. There is a strong smell of lichens, as if from the coat of an animal. Not much foliage inside the dimness scarcely penetrated by the light. The birches are s.h.a.ggy with black lichen.

The scent of almonds comes welling up out of all the acidity and decay. Strong and sweet. Do you want us to follow it?

I don't know who you are. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of an unshaven cheek, a pair of round gla.s.ses of the kind we used to laugh at. A long overcoat of stiff woollen fabric. We won't imagine each other. That's not good for us. You walk with me.

There's a wolf in here. A she-wolf. She's roaming round the edge of our field of vision.

What shall we do with the wolf? Have you got a scooter? If it were winter and you had a scooter, you could harry her to death. Now it's summer and there's a strong smell of almonds over this sun-spotted, mossy ground. The air is very still and when it moves, the breeze brings with it the scent of predators. What can you do with a wolf except kill it? We must go now. We must leave the forest and we are already far away from that other smell, the familiar smell that was so strong, it was almost bitter. We never found out where it came from.

Shuffling. The day always began with the shuffling or the squeak of the stove door. Petrus put a log inside. Then his sheepskin slippers shuffled across the floor again. He was over by the window, reading the thermometer. If there was a sc.r.a.ping sound, the window was covered with a jungle of ice crystals. He made a peephole with the nail of his forefinger among white ferns and starwort.

Then she remembered the forest in her dream. It was painful.

The bed was a nest of body heat, but the tip of Mia's nose was cold. She was lying with her back and bottom against Annie's stomach and chest, curled up like the child inside. The foetus. She usually straightened out. She sometimes fetched a log, too.

Petrus was peeing now, splas.h.i.+ng into the pot. It made her angry, hearing it. As early as November, they had had to move into the old cottage. Annie had hung blankets as a curtain round the bed in which she and Mia slept. She always washed and dressed behind the blankets and when she used the pot at night, she tried to be restrained. Petrus just splashed. Sometimes he farted, too. She wished he would wait until he had dressed and could go out. He probably didn't sleep much. He kept the fire going all night.

She tried to remember that he was kind and also deeply miserable, though he never said anything. Brita was in Roback for the winter, with the baby, and he hadn't been able to go down there for almost two weeks. First there had been storms, and then it had been too cold. They had received no mail. There might be a letter from Dan in the postbox.

Cold is standstill. Her own was over. It had lasted ever since that doctor had called after her in the forest. The ragged jeans had long since been burnt, but she hadn't been able to decide anything else. She was considering abortion. An abortion in ostersund?

It was Dan's child as well, though still only a foetus, a shoot of herself. A small tumour she had to have the right to remove. He didn't even have to know, so she said nothing about it in her letters. She had thought she would wait until he came back, and now she hadn't even an address.

When did it become a child? And when did it become his?

Petrus disposed of the kids. People disposed of dogs that had turned fierce or were no good for hunting. The expression was repugnant.

There were mornings when she woke feeling blissful without knowing why. She had dreamt, but what? That they had slept together, of course. But there was something else.

She had dreamt that he explained. She couldn't even laugh at it in the daytime, but at night when she was asleep, it was vivid. All his lies had been explained and he wanted the child and to live with them. What she had felt when they exchanged their gentle flow with each other was true.

In his letters, he never said that he was going to come back. All he said was that he been in Alved again, sleeping in a tent for the second time. For a whole month he had been running off stencils on a duplicator in a bas.e.m.e.nt in Hogbergsgatan. He thought he might be able find a couple to replace Bert and Enel. He wrote that he was working on it.

He still knew nothing about the child. It was a child now. Mia put her ear to Annie's stomach and listened. She could feel it in there. It was like the birds in the timber wall at night. Heartbeats and small movements.

Annie believed Dan had taken the car away from them. They became dependent on Yvonne and her old bus, and she thought it inconsiderate, but a.s.sumed he hadn't meant to be away so long. Sometimes they got a lift with Henry Stromgren down to the store and the post office in Blackwater, and one day he had asked whether it wasn't Annie's car that was parked below Aagot's barn.

'A pink Beetle?'

She asked him to look at the numberplate next time he went down there. When they met again he said that was right. It was her car. It had been there all the time.

That night she lay awake. At about one in the morning she heard footsteps on the floor. She lay waiting for the stove door to screech. As soon as Petrus had put two logs inside, he usually shuffled back to bed. But there was no shuffle. Pattering. She thought it was onis getting up for a pee. There were whispers, then a bed creaking. She was just about to fall asleep when she heard a suppressed noise, as if someone were whimpering.

A few nights later she heard the pattering steps again. Then the bed springs squealed and after a while there was no doubt whatsoever about what she was hearing.

She thought they were betraying everything. Brita. The commune. She remembered Ola Lennartsson's sly grin, his dirty innuendo. They were living down to the expectations of the village. Stoking up the prejudices.

Though that wasn't logical. The village knew nothing. Only Annie knew and she felt like a voyeur. Or an auditeur if there was such a thing. It was considered normal to be a voyeur in front of a television or cinema screen. But how many would stand the reality? That light moan. Broken-off gasps. The rhythmical creak of the bed.

They did it almost every night, at about one in the morning. Petrus was never the one to take the initiative. Marianne went across to his bed. Sometimes, Annie thought she understood them anything for a little warmth and closeness in this cold. But she never longed for Dan when they were moving over there. She was sickened and thought they were preventing her from dreaming about him.

She often dreamt. Awake, she was frightened and bitter.

Her old antipathy to Petrus had returned. For a while she had quite liked him. He was an oddball. He thought mostly about cheese, talked like the Bible and did everything very slowly. But he did it well. Now she was remembering repellent things.

When Brita had given birth to her child and the journalists had come, Petrus had taken over. It was he who had told them what it was like to have a child at Starhill. At the time, she hadn't wanted to read the article. Now she hunted for it while he was out. She found a whole heap of newspaper cuttings. He had been collecting cuttings on the murders.

In the interview on giving birth, he had said he had buried the afterbirth below the kitchen window. It made good manure.

He wanted to do what they used to do before, in the olden days, as he always said. But he didn't understand that the afterbirth was sacrificed so that the earth would be fertile like the woman. Petrus thought it was about manure. That was not only stupid, but vile.

She wanted to leave, a vague but persistent desire. But then the cold had come. It had grown much too cold to ski down, though she had tried once. It was twenty-seven degrees below freezing, the first morning in almost two weeks that the temperature had not dropped to thirty. But when she got up a little speed down the first slope, the fluid from her tear glands had frozen. She thought her eyes might break like gla.s.s, so she had turned back.

She put out her hand and grabbed her sweater, longjohns and thick woollen socks. Mia didn't wake as she dressed under the covers, which she then pulled over Mia so that nothing showed but a tuft of reddish hair.

It was hot next to the stove. They had put blankets and sheepskins against the windowpanes to keep out the draught. She peered through the hole Petrus had sc.r.a.ped in the icy armour of the pane. Eighteen below.

It was over. The cold was evaporating, the water moving, at least on the windowpanes. Her breath made the ice melt as she blew on it slowly.

It's over.

I am not the place, immovable, to which you will return. I am not marked and demarcated. I happen. Mobility.

When onis handed her the mug of milky tea, Annie said: 'I'm going down today.'

The snow was dry, a crystalline powder swirling up round the tips of her skis. There were no tracks over the pasture after the night of cold. The fox had lain still, the capercaillie burrowed down in the powder.

In the afternoon, as the light faded, a procession of t.i.tmice had crept in under the wind s.h.i.+elds and into the holes left by the dowels in the cottage wall. They had heard them rustling. Twenty-gram bodies pressed against each other during the night, hearts beating as one. Now they were clinging to the lumps of tallow in the sun.

Bear Mountain was so white from the sun that she found it hard to keep her eyes on it; the sun's glowing core would follow and dazzle her for two and half hours. The sky was thin and a brilliant blue, but at the zenith it blackened before her eyes. All the mountains were white with sides of sharp dark-blue shadow, the ice glistening on the peaks.

There were bird tracks down by the stream. The grouse had been embroidering neatly with their feet, taking birch buds, spilling a little and leaving dry little droppings.

By now she knew this ground better than any floor. She knew what the moss beneath the snow was like, infiltrated with lichens and glossy scrub. She remembered the moist, acidic smell of earth. When it emerged from the snow her own life would begin to smell like s.e.x, like wet hair.

She made her way ahead high above the ground. The birches' height had been reduced by the one and a half-metre layer of snow. Deep down there were tiny remains of warmth, torpor prevailing, downturning, the precise economy of dearth.

She skied into the forest where the new snow had not reached, her skis sc.r.a.ping against the crust under a spruce. G.o.d knows what that sounded like to the voles. She was on her way down to the sound that carried all the way up to Starhill. Sometimes distantly, depending on the wind. On calm days, they could hear it all the time. Rumbling day after day. They no longer talked about it.

She was afraid of the cold. The child weighed her down and the weight was growing in her belly. Every week that went by, she grew more afraid.

'Now bitter death doth bear upon us.'

That was something she had once sung in church, though she hadn't understood what 'bear upon' meant.

Approach. In reality.

Cold is standstill. The weather forecasts had said that the high pressure was at a standstill. Death doth bear upon us. Petrus thought she was morbid. It was stupid to talk so much.

There were five of them now at Starhill. And three cats, a Norwegian elk hound and nineteen goats. The billy goat. Eight hens. And rats. Not only the cottage mice, which rustled across the floor at night; large rats had gnawed their way into the wooden chests of grain and feedstuff.

Lotta had left in September. She had sent several postcards, all with cats on them, a.s.suring them she would come back in the spring. Suddenly the cards stopped coming.

Was she dead? A syringe in some lavatory. A madman. What thoughts. Now bitter death doth bear upon us. It's morbid, Petrus would say.

The cold is death, is life curled down low. Wax-covered. With no fluid. No pulse. But inside me blood is throbbing, the waters in the foetal sac s.h.i.+fting with the movements of the ski sticks and skis.

Now she could hear the water. The mountain river. The river Lobber. The same sound that had been heard before the water was given a name. She had got right down to the river but could no longer hear the rumble she had gone to find. The noise of the water was louder, the current rapid here. The stones wore caps of snow, threads and fringes of ice. The waves caught reflections from the sun and threw a mobile net across the riverbed. It looked as if the great black stones down there were moving, gliding silently beneath the golden net.

She had been fearful of the calm part of the river closest to the Kloppen and had gone too far north. Now she was almost up by the rapids. When she set off downhill, she saw that the wooden bridge had been replaced by an iron structure.

She skied about a kilometre back along the uneven terrain by the river before she heard the noise again, growing louder and louder. Up at Starhill they could hear the rumble for hour after hour throughout the short days and long after darkness fell. Petrus had crossed the river at the ford and had seen it. He said it was a processor and the company was going to clear-fell the forest right up to Starhill.

When it suddenly became lighter, she was unprepared. She saw the machine, yellow and as big as a bus. A felled spruce was being edged down to a transport track, branches and twigs flying all round it. The machine nudged the trunk ahead, grabbed it and swung, roaring at every movement. She had to ski away, as the sound was unbearable for any length of time.

She couldn't quite figure out where she was. The s.p.a.ce the forest had formed down towards the river had gone, and there were inexplicable waves and hollows in the snow. She could see a long way over the marshlands on the other side. It was all far more violent than she had thought.

She could see the man right up there in the driver's cabin. He was wearing a helmet and large ear protectors. He hadn't spotted her, and she didn't dare go any closer, afraid a tree might fall on her.

It had seemed so simple to go down and speak to him, but now she didn't know how to approach the processor. When she saw the destruction down towards the river, she became frightened of the driver, although that was not sensible. He was only a man in a yellow helmet.

She hadn't realised how quickly it all went. The machine would soon have crept towards Starhill.

When they can't get the hemp they won't stay long, someone had said, getting a laugh. In some places, people were pleased the company was clear-felling below Starhill. But many others thought it a pity that the whole of the mountainside down to the Lobber was to be sc.r.a.ped bare. Would it ever grow again after replanting? It was so high up. Frost and sun would scorch it. What would happen to the pastures when the forest no longer protected them?

Dan had written that the company had asked the police to help evict them from Starhill. He would come then, he said. Annie had imagined dogs, Alsatians, police in overalls with harnesses and guns in holsters, Mia terrified. She could picture them marching off with the goats behind them and the children crying. But Petrus had said they were only warning shots. The company didn't want things written about them in the papers.

Now they had begun clear-felling instead. It went quickly and the change was so violent it was incomprehensible, although it was happening right in front of her nose. At close quarters the sound was terrifying. Perhaps elk were standing there, just as she was. Bears. Perhaps creatures were standing listening between the spruces further up. She hadn't imagined the felling to be like this. She had thought it would be all right to go up and speak to someone and that there would be more than one of them. Now she had to keep moving on the edge of the forest and wait for the driver. Her face began to grow stiff with cold.

Suppose she got frostbite? Suppose the only result of this trip was frostbite? Perhaps he wouldn't even speak to her. She hadn't even considered that he might feel solidarity with the company. She hadn't said a word to Petrus and onis about what she planned to do. She couldn't cope with discussions. There was nothing to discuss. There was only the weight in her belly, growing greater every day.

She skied round and round the felling area, clambering on the uneven ground between the spruces, often pausing to rub her mouth and cheeks.

He finally stopped the machine, and the silence was like a collapse. Some time went by before she noticed she could hear the water again. The driver was climbing down, clumsy in his padded jacket, tough working trousers and steel-capped boots. When he got down to the ground, he lowered his head and stood looking at her.

She skied over to him, but when she tried to speak, her lips were so stiff she had to rub them first.

'I'd like to ask you something.'

He said nothing, but stood unhooking his chinstrap and taking off his helmet, revealing a lined leather hood underneath it. He was a large man with small, close-set eyes. He was probably dark and presumably quite strong, perhaps fat. But it was hard to see. He nodded and headed off towards the bridge. She didn't know whether he meant she should follow him and made a few hesitant movements with her ski sticks. He turned round and looked at her. No doubt he thought she would follow him.

She skied behind him across the bridge. It looked like some military arrangement. The old bridge lay tipped over on the side of the road. There was a car parked there, and a blue caravan with the company logo on it.

'Come on into the hut,' he said. 'Looks as if you've frozen your face.'

She went in after him and cautiously rubbed her cheeks. It was warm in the caravan. A gas heater was alight and there was a bunk, two chairs and a hardboard table with a newspaper and a coffee cup on it. He took out an aluminium lunch box and lit a gas ring. Annie sat down on one of the chairs and unzipped her jacket.

When he took off his leather hood, she recognised him. She didn't know what his name was, but he was one of the men who had come into Lennartsson's fis.h.i.+ng store on Midsummer Eve. He had snapped off Ola Lennartsson's flagpole. His brown hair was sweaty and curly. He made coffee, scarcely looking up as he did so.